Upskill.Health

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NHS Problem

Maternal mortality is at a 20-year high across the UK, with death rates four times higher for black women and two times higher for women from socially deprived areas. Multiple maternity inquiries have demanded training to be improved, prompting NHS England to publish a new, mandated, on-the-job curriculum for midwives in 2023.

Still, NHS trusts can’t deliver it because:

  • It is too expensive (protected training time = £30 million per annum)
  • It results in unmanageable rota gaps
  • Doubles the workload of already overstretched education staff

We urgently need a way to deliver quality on-the-job training that is cost-effective and scalable.

The Solution

Upskill.Health was founded to meet this urgent need to scale on-the-job training in the NHS. We’re building a mobile and virtual reality (VR)-based, microlearning platform to provide midwives with bitesize training that’s available, on-demand and ‘in the flow of work’. This will provide more frequent training at a 50 per cent lower cost. We’re also co-designing our platform with local women, passionate about improving training for NHS maternity staff. This has allowed us to train virtual, AI-powered avatars based on real women’s lived experiences and directly connect these with the frontline NHS staff, at scale.

Impact

Potential impact (numbers of staff and patients):

  • 28,000 NHS midwives in England
  • 700,000 women giving birth in England per year

Potential impact (cost to NHS):

NHS England has published a budget for NHS Trusts to deliver new, mandated on-the-job training curriculum:

  • £850 per midwife, per year
  • £30m for all maternity staff, per year

*This is a budget for paid-time for staff only and does not account for any cost of the training delivered.

Upskill.Health is confident that our combined mobile and VR platform can deliver this curriculum in 10 – 15 minutes, in the flow of work (reducing the need to release staff from clinical shifts).

  • Est. Cost saving 50%
  • Saving of £425 per midwife, per year
  • Saving of £15m for NHSE, per year

We anticipate additional impacts, including:

  • 25% reduction in administrative workload for clinical educators
  • Improved compliance reporting and governance (NHS England priority)
  • Improved involvement of local women in service improvement (NHS England priority)
  • Improved sharing of learning between trusts (NHS England priority)
  • Improved focus on maternal inequalities (NHS England priority)